tr1p tells the story of a guy who had a car accident while driving home from work after a 48h shift. He wakes up at night laying next to his crashed car in a place he doesn't seem to remember as a part of the route he usually takes to go home. Actually... he is now very, very, VERY far from home.
This is a Half-Life 2 first person shooter mod. Will you survive and make it back home to your family and friends?

To be fair, you did say it was going to be hard and most of the game is fairly challenging but the first major fight and the last chopper battle are bordering impossible. I finished the game but those two parts are seriously too hard. This is probably because there's no good place to make your stand at while at the same time there's not enough room for the player to fight while on the move and enemies keep spawning all around you.

Another problem was the level design, while mostly ok I spent a lot of time wondering where to go. This wasn't so bad at times (at the first poison zombie) and frustrating at others (after I let the ladder down into the playground). And when you figure out a way that you think is right, you don't know if you're exploiting or just doing what you're supposed to do (e.g. the walk on rail bit in the sewers, after I let the ladder down into the playground etc).

Speaking of exploits there were some bugs. The combines and zombies didn't attack each other except when the headcrab shell hit the playground during the first major fight some combines attacked the headcrabs. This left me wondering if the combines and the zombies are supposed to allies or if its just a bug. And the fast zombies sometimes went through walls when they tried to jump attack me.

The story is virtually nonexistant and what little there is, is just confusing. I mean why is this "normal?" guy wearing a hev-suit? Why does it end at the train, will he be home after that? Why are the combines attacking him, if he's just a worker? Why are the combines cooperating with the zombies, etc? If you're going to have that little story, why can't the protagonist simply be freeman?

The only reason this isn't rated as a 1 is because the mod creator mentioned it'd be difficult as hell. That's fair - he did exactly as he said he would.

All that said... if I were to come up with an apt metaphor for playing through "tr1p," it'd be like placing your testicles in a vise and squeezing as hard as you can. It is not fun. There is no nuance to this, no puzzles to solve other than the "puzzle" of finding out where the hell you're supposed to go next. The map design (which is decent) offers no hints, other than the occasionally missed sound - this is not a player friendly experience and the designer seems to take a sort of pride in this fact.

I agree that games have become dumbed down and easier, but even MGS told you to look on the back of the ******* box when you couldn't figure something out. There's a difference between challenge and completely alienating the player, and this mod gleefully does the latter.

Anyway - you play as someone who is apparently Gordon Freeman coming back from a "48 hour shift" (what is he, a firefighter?) Mind you, this is all flavor description from the mod page, so if you just load it up without looking you'll have no clue what's going on. It's just a barebones set up intended to offer some lame and flimsy pretense to go out and fight zombies and a metric fuckton (a precise measurement, imo) of Combine troops.

This doesn't tickle the brain, it holds no nuance or detail that doesn't continually drive you into combat or offer much to think about. It's a big dumb set of maps where you brutally kill things and press the F9 key a thousand times until you either open up the console and give yourself God mode or, more preferably, exit out.

Give 'er a miss. Again, I at least salute the creator for explicitly mentioning that this would be difficult as balls. I just didn't realize he meant "to the point of not being playable."

This mod was good, until the absolute end. The visuals were interesting, it was a mix between Ravenholm and Combine stuff. The fights were fun (until the end) and the actual puzzles were okay.

At the very end, however, it gets extremely tough. I didn't have to cheat to beat it, but it was a tedious and overly brutal climax involving fighting combine and a helicopter and having to hunt for hp every second because there was no place to stop and breathe. This was made worse at the very end with an almost endless supply of baddies running down a tunnel.

If there is one thing to learn from this mod, it's not to overwhelm the player and to give them time to breathe between fights. The fact that it was an unforgivably tough ending tarnishes an otherwise interesting and challenging game.

Other people seemed to enjoy this difficulty, and admittedly the description of the game says that it's made to be difficult, but there's difficulty and then there's a wall of a difficulty curve, and the very end is really the latter.

Great mod.
I really enjoyed playing. I must say, this mod is HARD. This one picks up about where HL2Ep2 on hardest difficulty left off. Not for the feint of heart. It reminded me of a day when not everyone was expected to finish. One of the best parts of this mod is the "stumbling around" aspect. Rather that be guided, you acutally have to take stake in what you do, and look for creative ways around thing. Probably the most unique thing that the mod added was the sprint-jump-crouch action which you not only have to do, but you have to do it while balancing, etc. Very fun. I must say I wore out my left mouse button trying to play this - very fun.

There's a plenty of cool combat and really hard battles against the CMB and zombies, in an old fashioned Half Life2 combat scenario.

The first part of the mod is really cool done, and there's a powerful Ravenholm atmosphere all the way, then the transition through the sewers until you reach the city was a little bit empty and it was puzzling to get through that section.

And then the final battle in the city before you reach the subway, was also a total mayhem and it was really cool, though some hunters or even some striders would have come perfect in that final section.

Overall was a pretty entertaining mod, as I liked fill with tons of combat and fighting, indeed this is so inside the HL universe that the story told by the author is really irrelevant, you are again old Gordon Freeman kicking some CMB and zombies butts classic and lovely like that.